Projet Memories of conflicts in Europe (The project 2Wards Europe)

Memories of conflicts in Europe (The project 2Wards Europe)

We have built a coordination group for this project composed of an historian of the University of Grenoble, 2 sociologists, a teacher, 3 image professionals. This group will work as a group of resource persons for the project and participants.
We had a meeting on last Friday 19th/10/2012. Here are the main propositions.

The theme

Our association is not a cultural centre. We work in support to groups and other cultural actors. So we don’t have a captive public, with whom we can envisage to develop the project. We have a to build a group of young adults.
This group is not ready to work yet. It has to be built by sensibilizing some young people studying at university and some other ones , from an experimental secondary school dealing with socially marginalised people (with scholar difficulties). So this group will be heterogeneous and for us it is an important dimension.
Due to that characteristic, we would like to work on memories of THE conflict and the ways they can be transmitted. It means that each participant may have heard, in his family or friends, stories related to different wars : Spanish war, independence war of Algeria, 1st and 2nd WW…
We take into consideration this diversity of stories to try to elaborate on THE conflict.

The process

Preparatory step : Once the group has been constituted, we would like to organise several preparatory workshops aiming at helping the group to be confronted to the various possibilities (conceptual, methodological and artistic) to explore the topic of memories of conflict, which will be treated by each participant in a second step. Different disciplines will be mobilised to train the group: history, sociology, photography, video, (maybe also philosophy). Participants to the project will have the possibility to back upon our resource persons group which will come to share with them the different ways to work on memory and memories.

Individual exploration step : A process of individual exploration of memory of conflict will be carried out by each participant, within his family, friend environment, with the support of the resource group.

Collective process : This exploration will be discussed and shared in group meetings , to make emerge gradually a collective dynamic.
Restitution and valorisation: According to this collective dynamic, the content of the restitution to be shared at local and European levels and the forms of this valorisation will be developed.

The calendar

The project lasts from summer 2012 till summer 2014.
We think that waiting for 2 years before being engaged in European exchanges is a too long period for young people: we don’t know if they will stay in the project beyond summer 2013.
There will be turnover. It means that we will need to propose different deadlines to motivate the group of participants for the production of restitution forms and exchanges with other groups in Europe. So it seems that we will have summer 2013 and summer 2014, as deadlines for producing and exchanging. We will need to envisage mobility for the group for summer 2013 and for summer 2014 (overall restitution of our project).

We hope it can be compatible with other partners previsions.
We hope those aspects will be clarified at our Cesis meeting, with preparatory contributions.